Don’t let this university wrecking government masquerade as reformers

Studying at Cambridge is unlikely to get any cheaper as a result of the government’s review.
Photograph: Nick Ansell/PA

There are some who might see Theresa May’s review of higher education funding as a victory for opponents of high fees and a setback to the relentless steamroller of the “market” that has been gathering pace in English higher education since the turn of the century.

It might also be tempting to view controversy about vice-chancellors’ salaries in a similar light, as evidence that there is now a chance of stopping the corporate university in its tracks and organising a successful fightback.

Sadly, there is a much less optimistic interpretation. The funding review and the pseudo-populist attack on top salaries are part of a wider attack on higher education, alongside the misuse of the Prevent strategy, which may ban illiberal speakers provided they are Muslims, and the insistence on a policy of “free speech” that protects all other illiberal speakers, a motley bunch of homophobes, anti-feminists, Brexiters and so on.

The fees and funding system in England is certainly bust. Graduates are burdened with unreasonable debt, while the state faces an escalating bill. Universities have avoided the squeeze that almost every other part of the public sector has suffered since 2010 because of the high fees. And they have misused that good luck to fund glitzy buildings and misleading advertising in brand wars rather than invest in more teachers or better salaries.

But only the naive imagine the government’s review is driven by a road-to-Damascus conversion about the iniquities of high fees or managerialism. May’s starting point – and presumably the review’s finishing point – is that English higher education is too expensive. It is the most expensive public system of higher education in the world (including the US). And she should know. She was a senior cabinet member responsible for this sorry state of affairs.

It is not hard to work out what will happen when the fog of clever schemes to square the circle has cleared. Fees at Oxbridge and other Russell Group universities will not be reduced under this government. They may even be uncapped so they could rise further. But fees at other institutions, especially the post-92 universities – which have done most to transform the landscape of higher education – will be forced down.

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The justification will be that they don’t provide such good value-for-money or high quality. Boiled down, that means their graduates find it more difficult to smooth their way via unpaid internships and privileged networks into top jobs, and they have the courage to offer opportunities to students who would be rejected by universities higher up the food chain because of their initial qualifications.

It is a similar story with vice-chancellors’ pay. An over-active and intrusive Office for Students will formally require universities to justify any salaries that exceed the £150,000 benchmark set by the prime minister’s salary. The chances of any university being forced to cut its vice-chancellor’s salary are zero.

But the OfS, a politicised body light years away from its more respectable predecessors, will have a mandate to meddle with anything that ministers, or the rightwing press, do not like. It is not hard to imagine the list of dislikes: too many first-class degrees from the wrong kind of university or Jacob Rees-Mogg being shouted at. The limited freedom universities had managed to preserve during the modernising mania of the Blair/Brown years will dwindle further.

Despite fees (which should indeed be abolished), despite greedy vice-chancellors (who should be restrained), we should never forget that higher education is an immense power for good. Millions have benefited from its expansion, the skills base of the economy has been massively expanded and our society has become more enlightened. Wreckers, enemies of that progress, should not be allowed to masquerade as “reformers”.

Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the UCL Institute of Education